Oprah Winfrey addressed the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, discussing racism, sexism, income inequality, and “childless cat ladies.”
JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, recently reiterated his 2021 statement that the country is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Despite being the stepmother of two, Vance included Vice President Kamala Harris on his childless, thus miserable list.
“It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” the then-Senate-candidate Vance stated in a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The interview video resurfaced on social media last week, as did an unrelated 2021 tweet in which Vance used the term “weird cat ladies” as an insult.
The “childless cat lady” remark, which many found offensive and dismissive, elicited a swift and sharp rebuttal from Winfrey, who did not hold back in her criticism.
“Despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbors,” Oprah said. “When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion; we don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No. We just try to do the best we can to save them.”
She added, “And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.”
Oprah also criticized Trump’s “ridiculous tweets, lies, and foolery,” as well as his claim that Christians would not have to vote again if they voted for him in November.
“There’s a certain candidate that says, ‘if we just go to the polls this one time, that we’ll never have to do it again,'” she said. “Well, you know what, you’re looking at a registered independent who’s proud to vote again and again and again because I’m an American, and that’s what Americans do.”
Harris is the stepmother of two children in their twenties, who famously call her “Momala.”
Their biological mother, Kerstin Emhoff, has publicly condemned the “baseless attacks” and praised Harris for being a “loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present” co-parent for the past decade.
Ella Emhoff, one of Emhoff’s daughters, defended her stepmother in a social media post, saying, “I love my three parents.”
